I agree. I don't think we could survive as a community a second hard fork away from a solitary takeover, or our current oligarchy changing policies to allow more censorship. I find that prospect likely going forward, as political pressure is going to mount to censor the folks posting on Hive.
The oligarchy seems to be intent on income primarily, and nominal threats that could be brought to bear on them if they continue to resist censorship will probably work.
Why do you think that our current oligarchy changing policies to allow more censorship might be likely going forward? Is it because of the blockchain war, or people dual posting to both chains and those who oppose it?
Banksters are intent on achieving a global tyranny, and the pointy end of that assault is psychological manipulation. Factual information renders their propaganda weapon useless, so they are absolutely dependent on censorship, which Hive resists because the oligarchs govern it that way.
However, the primary interest of these oligarchs is personal aggrandizement, and the record of HF's, self-voting, circle jerks and the like clearly reveals this. This fact is easily ascertained and trivial to use to persuade the cabal governing Hive to support the imposition of the nascent global tyranny by threatening financial ruin.
Given the $T's being spent to censor the world and push the psyop that justifies the New World Order, as Hive stands out more and more as a vector for factual information the incentive to censor it increases as time goes on.
I don't think it will be long before we see the sudden imposition of censorship on Hive, or the replacement of extant oligarchs with Goldman Sachs sockpuppets a la Steem. In fact, I think Sun Yuchen's takeover of Steem was the initial attempt to do this, but the Hive oligarchs felt slighted and Hive exists because they weren't satisfied financially by Sun Yuchen's profits. They want to get paid to roll over.
Carrots and sticks, buyouts or concerted financial assaults on their assets, will quickly sort our covert owners into actual supporters of freedom and decentralization and greedy bastards. Since the record of their governance of the blockchain indicates they are the latter, I am pretty confident the rhetoric of decentralization will continue to spew from their lying mouths while they brutally censor anyone who speaks the truth, just as Sun Yuchen does on Steem today.
It's not a new model. They don't have to invent the wheel here. I can't count the number of examples in history where it has been implemented in the past. I can't count the successful examples of such covert leaders resisting that pressure to crush society either, because there just aren't any to count.
So, I reckon it's highly unlikely the decentralization rhetoric has any basis in actual fact, and their real motivations have been revealed by their actions to better profit from the blockchain during prior HF's.
Should be interesting to see how it all shakes
out. In part, it seems a bit like a distraction
from what's going on in the real world.
I agree. However, given the social evolution we are undergoing and the transformative potential of Hive to enable voluntarist, non-geographically based government, I suspect it could be central to IRL events, rather than inconsequential, but only if actual decentralization is undertaken.
I think the only problem with choosing a fixed position. All
dPoS or all decentralization, is that it breaks the thing. I'd
have to put some more thought into it. If we disregard the
stake entirely, it's less marketable as crypto. Hmm, I dunno.
It's such a weird and novel system, blockchain in general.
When you slap the social media aspect onto it, look out!
Things get broken if they're susceptible to hazards. It's why I have a job: people make stuff all the time that susceptible to hazards like rot, storms, and being run into by trucks. I fix stuff all the time that's succumbed to such hazards, and I reckon there isn't anything people make that doesn't need fixing from time to time.
Stuff that breaks and can't be fixed so it's better than it was before probably should just be replaced anyway. Sometimes conditions change, and stuff that was well made for previous conditions no longer is well able to perform in the new circumstances, and then it needs to be replaced with something that does meet exigent needs. I do that work too.
Conditions are changing. Blockchain is one of the new things that are being made to replace old things that used to work, like banks. Blockchains that can't replace banks won't meet the new needs we have, because banks are hopelessly broken, and need replacing.
Hive enables a new social paradigm. It's potentially far more than just social media, and far more than just a cryptocurrency. While the governance model is currently extremely weak and vulnerable to financial manipulation (as Steem shows) the combination of social intercourse and economic functionality makes possible a new kind of government than has ever existed in history: completely voluntary, non-geographical government that cannot oppress it's people (other than through censorship, which is, again, as Steem now reveals, one of it's worst vulnerabilities)
Half the people of the world are presently under house arrest. Massive flows of money freshly conjured by national banks out of thin air are being delivered to investors across the planet, while the responsibility to repay that flow is being illegally levied on national citizens, and draconian impositions of police state oppressions, eradication of human rights, and extreme surveillance are being committed by tyrannies globally.
While the oldest form of government in the world, tyanny, is being imposed on the global population as a whole, Hive has the potential to deliver real freedom and economic security to that population. What is standing in the way of Hive meeting that need, of doing something Fakebook, Goolag, and Twatter could never do on their centralized platforms, is the legacy worldview of the oligarchy of ninjaminers that run Hive so they can profit financially. That is what makes Hive vulnerable to the Sybil attack that has destroyed Steem, that made Hive necessary to preserve the financial productivity Steem used to have to that oligarchy in this fork of Steem, and is keeping billions of people from becoming citizens of this new form of government that will replace barbarism.
Hive may not be able to break free of the oligarchy that keeps it hostage to their wallets, and that will be what breaks it, not being too decentralized. I am confident that the need for that new form of governance is palpably real to millions of people in the world today, and millions more need it but don't know it yet, because their financial ruin is still in progress as the banksters destroy the global economy, and they haven't begun to watch their children starve because of it yet.
But they will jump on that form of government when it is available and they realize the old ways are broken. Should Hive break instead of break free, lots of developers are ready, willing, and able to make a new blockchain, or hashgraph, or better platform that won't break the same way.
That voluntary government is necessary to the people of the world today, and the barbarism breaking all around us due to the exact financial Sybil attack that took down Steem is why. The old way of tyranny and oppression, centralization and parasitism by banksters is busted, broken and beaten by blockchain. Hive may be too controlled by that legacy financial mechanism to meet the need people have, and that is sad. The world will not simply fail to meet that need if Hive fails though, because people will meet their need anyway.
I gather from this that you're against dPoS entirely, and that's a perfectly valid idea. The only problem with it is that the system is set up in such a way to incentivize people to buy the token. People seek some sort of empowerment, and in the world of dPoS, the stake is that power.
So outside of having a platform that can resist centralization and censorship, I'm not sure if that alone is enough to trigger people to buy tokens if they can't get extra influence over the distribution of network rewards.
If people are less inclined to buy the tokens for that reason, then people who mine/witness might be less inclined to run that software if the token demand doesn't meet a certain threshold. Specifically, one that gives the token, a sufficient enough value to bother with absorbing the expense of running the nodes and producing blocks.